At a budget retreat meeting in early April, Lynchburg’s head of finance shared that the private Christian institution Liberty University had plans to nearly double its number of on-campus students, news she and the city manager brought to ratings agencies Moody’s and S&P earlier this spring. The problem? University officials say it’s not true.
At an April 3 budget meeting, Lynchburg chief financial officer Donna Witt shared that Liberty University planned to nearly double the size of its on-campus student population from 16,000 to 30,000--good news, she said, that would continue to build city coffers through meals and hotel taxes, which, over the last year, increased 2.4%.
“This is one of the things our rating agencies landed on, is they asked about our consumption taxes, and whether we were projecting growth into 2027.”
Witt is a Liberty University graduate and a veteran city employee.
“And we are. We’re expecting that to continue. A lot of that, and we had this conversation with our ratings agency, too, is based on the fact that we have so many college students in our town. Liberty is a very big growth engine for us. And we are very appreciative of them, because, one thing about Baptists, is they’re going to eat, and their parents are going to come and see them, so that’s a great thing.”
Witt and city manager Wynter Benda had recently returned from meetings with rating agencies in New York City, including Moody’s, Fitch Ratings, and S&P Global Ratings, sharing the news that Lynchburg’s population would increase by 20% by 2031.
The problem? Liberty University says it’s untrue.
“This academic year, we surpassed 132K students for all online programs, while reaching a 16.2K on-campus student population,” Liberty said in a statement. “While our strategic plan aims to increase our online and campus enrollment, there are no immediate or long-term plans to take our Lynchburg campus population beyond its current capacity.”
Now city officials are worried about having shared the bad numbers with ratings agencies, and possible messy legal ramifications in the midst of what is an already tense budget season.
Council member Marty Misjuns spoke Tuesday night at a Lynchburg City Council meeting.
“A 30,000 by 2031 Liberty University on-campus enrollment projection was provided to those rating agencies during the credit presentation, a projection that’s now been told to us was heard somewhere, that the city got ahead of itself on, there’s no source for that information, admits it may or may not be accurate. We’re talking about a projection that was provided to the credit rating agencies of nearly a 20% increase in our population by 2031 that was published in the S&P report, that was published in the News & Advance, that people looking to invest in our city may see that as a signal to, ‘Hey, we need to invest in the next five years by 2031 before this projected population growth.’”
“What specific legal and reputational risk does this create for the city of Lynchburg, specifically, is there any potential for SEC enforcement exposure for misleading disclosures in connection with our series 2026 obligation bonds?”
Vice Mayor Curt Diemer agreed, just before council members headed into a closed session with the city attorney.
“If anything was overstated or not fully accurate it needs to be corrected. With every group that relied on that information, including our citizens, this is about credibility and making sure the record is accurate.”
Swelling populations of college students would likely continue to drive up Lynchburg’s rental market, which had already increased 3% across 2025, according to a Virginia Realtors report, the second highest increase in the state behind Charlottesville, which increased 4.7% in 2025 but behind Northern Virginia rental prices, which increased 2.8%.